4 Hartley Burr Alexander 



characteristic quality to our expression, when expression is vouch- 

 safed us. Strongly metaphorical because the half-truth of meta- 

 phor conveys the confusion as well as the strength of the high- 

 wrought mood ; spontaneous and brief because of the turbulence 

 within the pent source : these are the natural qualities of our most 

 native expression, and it is perhaps needless to say that they are 

 essentially characteristics of lyrical expression. At least, in a 

 type of mind conceptually rather than sensuously imaginative, — 

 which will therefore give its art a literary form, — these qualities 

 demand the lyric; and with due deference to Shakespeare and 

 Elizabethan drama, it appears to me certain that it is just in our 

 lyric literature that the most genuine embodiment of English 

 character and genius is to be found. 



II. POETIC MODE 



Race and culture (and in culture I include all that grows out 

 of language and tradition) furnish medium and background of 

 poetic expression. They enrich the poet's personality, his charac- 

 ter and experience ; they supply him with an audience of kindred 

 understanding; they enable fullness and surety of utterance aris- 

 ing from the reflection of his life and mood in the larger life of 

 his people. Individuality thus comes to mean a fine precipita- 

 tion of what marks the essential character of race or culture : in 

 mood it is an acute delicacy of response to underweaving in- 

 stincts ; in expression it is a lively mirroring of cultural shadow 

 and tone. The quality of expression to which in these guises it 

 gives occasion Matthew Arnold called mode, — thereby indicating 

 a something more than manner though less than mood, some- 

 thing partly of the nature of method but instinctive and fixed in 

 the blood. 



In that noteworthy essay on The Study of Celtic Literature, 

 Arnold distinguishes three* modes of English poetry which he as- 

 cribes to three cultural sources, two native to the race and one 

 appropriated from without. The native modes are a Celtic and 

 a Saxon, the one appropriated is the classical. 



First, though our author assigns to it last appearance in our 



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